The Chronicle of the Silent Overseer

This document details the fracturing of a Thread, belonging to the Incarnation known as Xelnor Filbats. It serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of pure pragmatism when confronted with a reality that refuses to be quantified. It is a story of how a mind, meticulously bred for order, can be annihilated by a truth it is incapable of perceiving.

The Incarnation: Xelnor Filbats, The Functionary

Initial State: Xelnor Filbats was a Henai, a cephalopod-like being engineered over generations for a single purpose: work. As a middle-manager overseeing mining operations on a desolate backwater world, Xelnor’s existence was defined not by a personal philosophy, but by a deeply ingrained, almost biological, piece of Eidos:

Faith: “A problem is a set of variables to be optimized. A life is a series of tasks to be completed. All else is noise.”

This Faith in pure instrumentality was Xelnor’s shield and purpose. The universe was a spreadsheet, and Xelnor’s job was to make the numbers balance. Thoughts of galactic politics, rebellion on Wele 3, or even the strange plague causing worlds to go silent were dismissed as irrelevant data points, distractions from the immediate, quantifiable crisis of a massive power drain at a defunct mining site: B1-Ax450.

The Thread: A Dissonant Variable

Xelnor’s rigid schedule and worldview were disrupted by an unscheduled variable: an unrecognized individual who appeared unannounced in Xelnor’s office. The stranger was an Oneiroi, a “Dreamer,” a species that perceives the symbolic undercurrents of the Tapestry as being more real than the physical world.

The Dreamer presented a Fiction that was, to Xelnor, nonsensical. The power drain at B1-Ax450 was not a technical fault. The nightmares plaguing the mining crews were not stress. They were symptoms. The mine had disturbed something ancient, and the lights were not merely “on”; they were a beacon, drawing power to feed a “starving dream.”

Xelnor, driven by the need to solve the power drain, dismissed this as fantasy. Yet, with the company boss mysteriously missing and a terrestrial expedition being the only way to physically access the site’s controls, the Dreamer’s knowledge of the overgrown jungle paths made the strange being a necessary, if irritating, tool. Xelnor authorized the expedition, a pragmatic choice that would lead to a metaphysical reckoning.

The journey was a study in contrasts. Xelnor analyzed terrain and resource expenditure. The Dreamer spoke of the forest’s “sadness” and the “fear” of the animals. To Xelnor, this was noise. To the Dreamer, it was data.

The Fracture: A Truth Beyond Calculation

Upon reaching B1-Ax450, the scene was one of profound wrongness. The industrial lights were not just on; they pulsed in a slow, rhythmic, almost biological pattern. The air hummed with a low-frequency resonance that Xelnor, for the first time, could not categorize.

The Dreamer revealed the nature of the entity they had awoken: a dormant psychic consciousness, a fragment of a dead god, a raw and powerful node of pure Eidos. It was confused, dreaming, and feeding on the planet’s energy grid in a desperate attempt to maintain its own coherence. The nightmares of the crew were its own dreams, bleeding into their sleeping minds.

The Dreamer proposed a Ritual of soothing, a song of resonance to calm the entity and guide its dreams, potentially transforming it from a hazard into a stable, symbiotic power source.

For Xelnor, this was the ultimate system error. The variables were no longer quantifiable. “Entity,” “dream,” “ritual”—these were not terms that existed in the Henai lexicon of optimization. Faced with a choice between an action grounded in its Faith (the logical, pragmatic act of cutting the power) and an action grounded in the Dreamer’s Faith (a ritual based on an unprovable metaphysical claim), Xelnor defaulted to its core programming. The problem was a power drain. The solution was to cut the power.

Xelnor ordered the demolition charges placed on the primary power conduit. The Dreamer pleaded, but could not stop the sequence. As the charges detonated and the conduit was severed, the entity, starved of its energy source and shocked into agony, let out a final, silent scream. It was a wave of pure, un-filtered Eidos—a billion years of alien consciousness, pain, and confusion released in a single, explosive instant.

The Dreamer, attuned to such things, was instantly annihilated, their physical form dissolving into dust.

Xelnor’s mind, a structure built for columns and rows, for inputs and outputs, received the blast. It was not data. It was not noise. It was a truth so vast and so alien that it could not be processed. It was a division by zero error in the calculus of its soul.

The Aftermath: The Silent Overseer

The expedition team found Xelnor days later, sitting at the command console of B1-Ax450, the emergency lights casting a dim glow on its motionless form. The power drain had stopped. The problem was solved. But the Incarnation known as Xelnor Filbats was gone. Its mind, shattered by a reality it could not compute, had been wiped clean, leaving only the biological shell. Its Thread was not cut, but erased, leaving a perfect, functional void.

The Harvest: The Eidos of Unbelief

The story of Xelnor is a “Broken Thread.” It serves as a testament to the fact that a Faith in pure logic can be as blinding as any superstition. The Eidos harvested from this life is a potent and cautionary one:

• Fact: Certain geological formations can house dormant, high-energy psychic entities that can be inadvertently awakened by industrial activity.
• Fiction: The ghost story of “The Silent Overseer,” a cautionary tale told among miners on the galactic rim about a manager who went mad in a remote outpost, forever staring at a screen that is turned off.
• Faith: The belief that a reality that cannot be measured is not real is a dangerous and potentially fatal delusion.
• Symbol Tags: [fracture], [denial_of_truth], [consequence_of_unbelief], [ontological_shock].

This experience unlocks the potential for future Incarnations to be more attuned to metaphysical realities, or conversely, for a player to seed a new Tapestry with a hyper-rationalist Faction destined to make the same catastrophic mistake. It proves that in the universe of ATET, sometimes the most pragmatic choice is to believe in dreams.